A Semi-Analytical Approximation to the Block Error Rate in Nakagami-m Block Fading Channels

Report, 2009

One of the main performance measures of any packet based communication system is the success rate of the packets. A packet is successfully received if the arrival of the packet is detected correctly, header is received successfully, and payload is decoded without errors. At the moment, the probability of failure to decode the payload, i.e., block error rate (BLER), is often obtained by numerical methods, such as Monte-Carlo simulations due to shortage of analytical expressions for BLER. In this work, an approximation method for estimating the BLER in Nakagami-m block-fading channels is proposed. Furthermore, an analytical expression with a single parameter is derived for Nakagami- m channels. This parameter can be obtained by single simulation at a single signal to noise ratio (SNR) in Rayleigh fading channel. Our simulation results demonstrates that the proposed methods is highly accurate is estimating the BLER of many important wireless technologies.